Of course, this time of year especially, it’s hard to find a day on the calendar that isn’t the anniversary of one terrible mine disaster or another. They kind of all run together sometimes, which I guess is part of the problem. The names of the mines and the towns — even the names of the miners — are often forgotten by all of us, except of course our neighbors who have lost fathers, sons, brothers and friends. For those families, the grief goes on and on.

It’s equally tempting to make far too much of it. A sea change in how coal-mine safety is enforced in this country?

It’s almost as tempting to politicize it. Is Booth Goodwin going to announce his run for governor now? Remember how all those Republicans tried to weaken our mine safety laws?

At the same time, if you look at Brian Ferguson’s photo on the front page of today’s Gazette-Mail, it’s difficult not to see more than a bit of smugness in Blankenship’s grin. After all, when jurors marked only the first of two “objects” of the conspiracy in Count One on their verdict form — and then checked “not guilty” for Counts Two and Three — they knocked the conviction down to a misdemeanor that, yes, carries a maximum prison sentence of only one year.

Now, I don’t know about you. But if I have my choice of no days in jail or a year — or even a day — in jail, I’ll take no days in jail, thank you very much. And remember that we don’t have much of any idea at this point how the potential fine — up to twice the financial gain or loss from Blankenship’s conspiracy — might shake out.

Photo by Kenny Kemp

There will be a lot of second guessing about the case now. Every lawyer in town will know how prosecutors could have done a better job. Blankenship’s defense team will push their position that there was never any case anyway, and it shouldn’t been brought or tried in the first place.

But I’m reminded of a piece I wrote a few years ago about how journalists cover the coal industry, focusing on why we allow ourselves to get tied into knots comparing the numbers of violations various mining companies and specific mines receive — instead of just asking the basic question of why any violations of the law at all are acceptable in an industry where the margin for error is so small and the potential for disaster is so large.

Which is why it’s worth remembering — as U.S. Attorney Goodwin and lead prosecutor Steve Ruby reminded us yesterday — that Congress has decided that the policy of this country is that willfully violating the federal standards intended to protect the health and safety of coal miners is a misdemeanor. If you don’t understand that word, it means “minor offense” or “lesser crime.”

Goodwin and Ruby can’t change that. But there are a few West Virginians who can — Sens. Joe Manchin and Shelley Moore Capito could help do that. So could Reps. David McKinley, Alex Mooney and Evan Jenkins.

In our paper today, though, you didn’t see any sign from any of those elected officials that even talking about that issue was something they wanted to do. As David Gutman reported:

Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., who was governor at the time of the explosion and has publicly sparred with Blankenship, said the verdict signaled that West Virginia will not allow profits to be prioritized over safety.

“I am pleased the jury’s decision has brought some measure of justice to one of the most tragic mining disasters in recent history,” Manchin, a Democrat, said in a prepared statement. “I hope that today brings some closure and peace to the families of the miners.”

… Ashley Berrang, a spokeswoman for Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., said Capito respects the jury’s decision and added, “Nothing can make up for the heartache felt by the families of the 29 hard-working miners who lost their lives on that tragic day.”

West Virginia’s three Republican congressmen would not comment on the verdict, and neither would the state’s Republican Party leadership.

West Virginia political leaders can certainly rush to defend the coal companies from any potential new regulations, but when it comes right down to it, it’s hard to find them really in any big hurry to do much of consequence to hold the executives who run those companies accountable for their safety practices.

Take our Democratic governor, Earl Ray Tomblin. He couldn’t be bothered to say anything about the Blankenship verdict. His legislative response to Upper Big Branch was to start drug testing coal miners — when he and everyone else involved in that legislation knew that drugs had nothing to do with the mine disaster. And when miners die on the job, Tomblin seems to fall back in time to 1968, making it sound like these things just happen and there’s little anyone can do about it.

At its very core, it is this acceptance of our state’s lot in life that the prosecution of Don Blankenship sought to change. Those 12 jurors did their job in that regard. The rest of us can keep arguing all we want about mining permits and carbon dioxide regulations, even about proximity detection systems or coal-dust limits. But until the state’s political leaders and its people catch up to the jury on one simple notion — that running a coal company where violating safety laws is part of the business model is a serious crime — nothing here is really going to change.

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Comments

Ken- I think you are focusing on the right issue as we go forward. Congress can and should amend the law, possibly modeled on the DUI statutes that treat offenses resulting in death as felony offenses. And it’s also right to note that every lawyer in town will have an arm chair view on how Boothe Goodwin might have done things a different way. But let’s not lose site of the big picture: he indicted and convicted the most prominent official of any coal company over the last two decades. That is truly unprecedented, and it draws a pretty clear line in the dirt for the future. He deserves our respect for that, especially given the statutes on the books at the time of the offense.

I am continually thankful for the investigative journalism of Ken Ward over decades.
His coverage of Don Blankenship throughout the years continues to be exceptional.
My thankfulness is also extended to the jurors for their tough work.
The outcome — so far — of this trial says more about pseudo regulation of mine safety than anything else.

DB played a key economic/historic role in helping to keep Central Appalachian coal viable in the fiercely competitive world coal business for a long time. “Running a coal company where violating safety laws [and busting unions] is part of the business model”, as Ken puts it, made hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars for Wall Street investors and their local compradors (look it up), here in the energy colony of West Virginia. DB served these folks’ financial ends faithfully, and now he is a convenient scapegoat. It’s a sad story. I thought Ken’s reporting of the UBB miners’ trial testimony, and how remarkable (and also historic) it was, was perhaps the high point of his coverage. Too bad the jury had to make such compromises, but that’s the luck of the draw. (Juries can be wrong — see O.J. Simpson.)

John Alexander Williams on Henry Gassaway Davis, Stephen Elkins, and other early WV industrialists: “They perfected West Virginia’s modern political system, subdued or coopted local competitors for power, adapted the state’s political representation along with its fuels and raw materials to the use of metropolitan industrialism, and trained their less powerful collaborators and successors to the work of a comprador middle class.”

Passing more laws as proposed by some won’t help prevent prevent mine explosions if they aren’t enforced. For example,if MSHA inspectors had done their job the UBB Mine coal dust explosion would not have occurred. A report by a NIOSH panel, as reported in the Coal Tattoo column by Ken Ward Jr. dated March 23, 2012, stated among other things :
“If MSHA had taken appropriate actions during the inspections in the month prior to the explosion, either dangerous accumulations of explosive coal dust would have been rendered inert, or the mine would have been idled.” http://blogs.wvgazettemail.com/coaltattoo/2012/03/23/breaking-news-niosh-panel-says-proper-msha-
inspections-and-enforcement-likely-could-have-prevented-the-upper-big-branch-mine-disaster/
Inadequate rockdusting over such a wide area, as evidenced by the force of the explosion, didn’t happen overnight so there was ample time for inspectors to discover it. MSHA had the power as noted above to idle the mine until the violation was corrected and did not. Neither the inspectors nor the head of MSHA were held responsible for this dereliction of duty by the Gazette or other WV news media, notwithstanding the single Ward blog on the subject. Unfortunately, people only know what they read in the newspaper, as Will Rogers once said, so MSHA’s tragic failure is lost on the public and will be by historians.